Something we've long-maintained around the Dealbreaker office is that hedge fund manager Jim Simons would make a great fairy godmother, what with his soothing voice, white beard, and the fact that he's really just a lovable math teacher who happened to make a zillion dollars by tinkering away the computers in his garage and would be happy to lend the powers of his magic cigarette wand to those in need.  So we were extremely pleased to have our attention brought to an anecdote from Scott Patterson's Dark Pools, in which Simons seems to appear out of nowhere, just like a FGM would, sprinkles unexpected gifts on a young man and woman (of both hope* and nicotine), and then disappears as quickly as he came via golden carriage. (We also appreciate that Simons is the kind of FGM that will laugh in your face as you explain to him what a quant fund is, not realizing he's got some experience there.) One day in the summer of 2006, Fleiss was having lunch outdoors with his girlfriend at a restaurant on the Upper East Side. As they chatted in the sun after their meal, an elderly man dressed in a modest suit walked out of the restaurant and lit up a cigarette. Fleiss's girlfriend bummed a smoke off him, and they began to chat. "So what do you do?" he asked Fleiss. "I'm actually building a hedge fund that uses quantitative strategies to pick stocks," he said. "Oh really?" The man laughed. "Where did you go to school?" "Amherst." "Good school. You know, I'm also in the quant biz." Fleiss asked where he worked, but the man wouldn't answer. But Fleiss kept pushing. Finally, the man said he ran a fund called Renaissance Technologies. Fleiss nearly fell out of his chair. He wanted to talk more, but a gleaming Bentley had just pulled to the curb and Jim Simons quickly disappeared into it. Dark Pools [Scott Patterson] Related: Who Wants to Become A Rebellion Research Investor? *That some of his quant-i-ness would rub off on the guy.